Professor James Locke
- Professor of Quantitative Plant Development
- Associate Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory
- Research Group Leader
About
I am a quantitative biologist who studies how noisy and dynamic gene networks regulate behaviour in plants and microbes.
I use single-cell time-lapse microscopy, transcriptomics, stochastic modelling and synthetic biology to uncover how gene circuits generate pulsatile, oscillatory and heterogeneous expression patterns, and how these dynamics modulate development, stress responses and fitness in multicellular plants.
I studied Physics at the University of Warwick before completing Part III of the Mathematical Tripos in Cambridge. I then returned to Warwick for a joint PhD in Biology and Theoretical Physics with Andrew Millar and Matthew Turner, where I used iterative experiment–theory cycles to propose and validate a new feedback loop in the plant circadian clock. This work was recognised with a Promega Young Geneticist of the Year Award.
As an EMBO and Human Frontier Science Program Fellow in Michael Elowitz laboratory at California Institute of Technology, I developed quantitative single-cell imaging approaches and mathematical models that revealed how bacterial stress-response circuits use stochastic pulsing to generate phenotypic diversification. I also contributed to approaches for measuring gene expression dynamics in individual bacteria over many generations, which have been used in subsequent studies of microbial individuality and gene expression noise. For this work I was awarded the Merrimack–CSB2 Prize in Systems Biology in 2013.
Since 2012, I have led an interdisciplinary research group at the Sainsbury Laboratory, where I am now Professor of Quantitative Plant Development and Associate Director.
Research
Research interests
- Dynamic gene regulation
- Circadian clocks
- Stochastic modelling
- Coupled cellular dynamics
- Plant development
My research group works across microbial and plant systems. In cyanobacteria, we showed how circadian clocks and environmental inputs jointly control cell size. In bacteria, we demonstrated that stochastic pulsing of gene expression allows cells to survive stress and form biofilm patterns.
In Arabidopsis, we explained how local coupling and spatial waves of gene expression coordinate single-cell clock rhythms across tissues, revealed significant transcriptional variability between isogenic seedlings, and uncovered how hormone-regulated bistable switches and transcriptional variability can account for natural differences in the timing and variability of seed germination.
Our recent work has mapped how mixed positive and negative feedback loops generate diverse single-cell dynamics and how circadian clocks buffer environmental and molecular noise at the level of individual cells.
Funding
My research has been supported by long-term fellowships and competitive grants from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, the European Commission, the European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant), the Leverhulme Trust, the Human Frontier Science Program, the Royal Society (including a University Research Fellowship and Enhancement Award), UK Research Councils (including Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council) and ARIA. I am a member of the BBSRC Pool of Experts, a former member of the Royal Society Diversity Committee, an Associate Editor of Royal Society Open Science, and co-author of the plant chapter for Principles of Development.
Former members of my group now work in academic and industry positions in the UK and abroad.